Poo

I had been holding off demolishing the small upstairs bathroom until the other two were ready for human consumption. Well, the upstairs and downstairs bathrooms are now fully tiled, as are the two fireplaces (photos in a subsequent blog). So, it was time to move the working toilet and shower to the downstairs bathroom.

Since I'll still have workmen and my dirty body with which to contend, I decided to only use temporary fixtures downstairs. I bought a cheap plastic tub sink and decided to move the avocado green toilet from upstairs. A one hour job, right?

I assembled the tub and discovered that the drain was made of 1-1/2 inch pipe, while the hole in the wall is sized for 1-1/4" pipe. Aaargh, I said.

Off to Depot. No one home there, so I left and went to Lowe's. A very nice sales guy opened package after package until we found a reducer. After reminding me that reducing a drain was contrary to code, I picked up a wax ring for the commode and left for the IP.

The plastic sink went together OK and connected to the drain with no problem. But the supply lines were missing their jam nuts (no, not something one eats). Off to the Ace hardware by the IP where I found the nuts at $1.29 each. I went back to the IP and assembled everything. Only one leak that was easy to fix.

I went upstairs and used an entire roll of quicker picker uppers to get the water out of the commode. Carried it down in two pieces, much to the amusement of the flooring installation guys.

Put the wax ring down and it's about 1/4 inch too tall. And one of the two hold-down studs is stripped. No problem, I put the commode on the wax and sat on it till it only rocked a little bit. And made a mental note to fix the stud before putting the real commode in. Then poured water in to make sure it drained. Which it didn't.

Off to Kathleen's apartment to borrow her plunger. And to pee, as not having a working commode made my bladder very anxious.

The plunger worked wonders, I must have forgotten a chunk of paper towels.

I then put on the tank. Gross, the connecting bolts were all dirty and the rubber bits all hard and crusty. And the inside of the tank had that gross black stuff that one can't help but to be reminded of poo.

So I got the tank attached and it leaked. Back to Ace to get a tank mounting kit. Put it all together and the seal was too long. It still leaked. Back to Ace to get a proper sized seal.

I put everything together and double washered the bolts to make sure they wouldn't leak, and finally they didn't.

Then I asked the flooring guys to make me a "Toilet is now downstairs" sign in Spanish.

I don't look forward to installing the shower.